by Gina Headden Until recently, ITIL hovered at the edge of my known universe. Imagine my surprise, when on secondment to the team, I discovered that ITIL plays a crucial role in the University. Like the sun in our solar system, it’s central to maintaining order in what might otherwise be chaos – whether we’re […]

Over the last  few weeks the ITIL Team have been talking a lot more about Second Line Support, we’ve been blogging about it, talking about it and James has even created a video about

Sometimes even the best planned work can go wrong. Often you can identify the best planned work not by its resistance to failure, but by its resilience or recovery in the face of it. Reducing the likelihood of things going wrong is one part of planning for a change. Reducing the consequence if the worst […]

Hello ITIL Tattlers! This week finds us bringing you ITIL Tattle in unprecedented times and it’s now more than ever that process and routine can help people adapt to the strange world we find ourselves in. Most of us are trying to adapt to ways of working from home, whether that be working out a […]

In 1996, a PhD supervisor was in New Zealand on sabbatical and so guidance seemed impossible. Yet my email request for feedback, sent from Edinburgh, received a reply within under 5 minutes. This post is not a rant about email. Instead it probes the default assumption that service desks need to support email as a […]

Long time no see ITIL Tattlers! The medical theme in Robert’s post last week has encouraged me to resume blogging duties. His post cleverly applies First Aid principles to ITIL and I’ve had cause over the last few months to have a lot of interaction with our amazing NHS, so I’d come to the same […]

Doing certain things now will give us breathing and thinking space to assess our next response. First aid training includes a pre-prioritised list of immediate actions. Battlefield medics use MARCH, which in priority order means: Massive hemorrhage – if this isn’t stopped rapidly, everything else is in vain Airway – ensure an airway, as without a […]

The word “Incident” has been used for many years at The University of Edinburgh. We used it in our original Call Management tool Remedy, then in CMS and when UniDesk our current ITSM tool launched, our individual tickets were called “Incidents”. This never really sat well with the ITIL aware among us and so, in […]

A situation when in the opinion of the master, the vessel, vehicle, aircraft or person is in grave and imminent danger and requires immediate assistance. International conventions (SOLAS, COLREG) clearly establish when a distress signal (such as a “Mayday” call) may be made.  These same conventions bind those that receive a distress signal to respond in a particular way. Our […]

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts – for support rather than for illumination.” Andrew Lang So you need to do reporting and you think that adding categories and subcategories will be the solution? But what if you are wrong? Sometimes the obvious go-to solution is not the optimal solution; neither for […]